Bøger af Derek Walcott

Among the various avatars that the legendary aura of Homer and his work have known throughout the history of English letters, perhaps the two most astonishing are Joyce's Ulysses and Walcott's Omeros. As in the Iliad ("Omeros" is Homer's name "in the ancient language of the islands"), invoked by a Greek girl, Antigone, exiled in America), the story begins with the rivalry for the love of a woman. She is not a princess but a black Antillean maid, and those who fight for her are not kings but fishermen, but Helena's face is one of those in which the gods "consecrate all the beauty of a race." She loves Achilles but leaves him for Hector, and one day when the town is preparing for a party, the spurned lover sets sail from Santa Lucía and in an initiatory dream and a journey through centuries, is returned to the land of his ancestors, on the west coast of Africa. And while Achilles goes after his roots, another key character in the play, Dennis Plunkett, the white man, the colonizer, the eternal marginal in a town he loves, also completes his personal odyssey: after succumbing to the charm of Helena (once the island was named after the girl), he becomes, out of love for her, an expert on the history of the place, as well as its battles. The narrator, Homer's sorcerer's apprentice, Walcott himself, was born there but lives in Boston, has traveled the world and returns to visit his widowed mother, and he too is carried along by the currents and countercurrents that unite and They separate the characters of the poem, and he is also fascinated by Helena.

Two masterful artists-Gauguin and van Gogh-come alive in a vibrant drama about friendship, art, and madness Two painters-Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh-are living together in the sleepy town of Arles in 1888. Soon, Gauguin, frustrated by van Gogh's refusal to acknowledge his increasingly troubled mind, will depart for Paris. In two years, van Gogh will be dead by his own hand. In the meantime, the friends discuss their craft; they frequent a local café that van Gogh will soon immortalize; they become acquainted with a young prostitute, Lotte, who becomes Gauguin's lover; they argue; they paint. In Derek Walcott's new historical play, O Starry Starry Night, two world-renowned artists come to life as they wrestle both with grand themes-friendship, loyalty, fame-and with more mundane concerns, money primary among them. The scenes Walcott sketches summon several of van Gogh's most famous paintings: Sunflowers, The Night Café, The Bedroom at Arles. His manipulation of language-van Gogh's eloquent monologues giving way to more abstract speeches-evokes the painter's descent into madness. Over the action hangs the threat of violence, of death, which lends the play a potent urgency; for at least one of the characters, time is quickly running out. O Starry Starry Night is powerfully wrought, and demonstrates once again the sharpness of Walcott's eye: as a painter, as a poet, as a writer, and, above all, as an observer of human follies, foibles, failings, and aspirations.

In Moon-Child, the poet and playwright Derek Walcott returns to the island of St. Lucia for a lush and vivid tale of spirituality and the supernatural. In this lyrical new work, the crafty Planter (who may or may not be the Devil in disguise) schemes to take over the island for development. Between him and his goal lies the Bouton family, whose ailing matriarch strikes a bargain: if any of her three sons can get the Devil to feel anger and human weakness, the islanders will win the right to spend the rest of their days in wealth and peace.In a fable that reaches from St. Lucia's verdant forests to an explosive ending amid its plantation homes, Walcott has crafted a masterwork rich in flowing language and colorful Creole patois. With roots in Caribbean folklore and an eye toward the island's postcolonial legacy and complex racial identities, Moon-Child marks a remarkable new addition to the canon of one of the world's most prolific Caribbean playwrights.

Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's The Prodigal is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich Village to the Alps, Pescara to Milan, Germany to Cartagena. But always in "the music of memory, water," abides St. Lucia, the author's birthplace, and the living sea. In this book of poems, Derek Walcott has created a sweeping yet intimate epic of an exhausted Europe studded with church spires and mountains, train stations and statuary, where the New World is an idea, a "wavering map," and where History subsumes the natural history of his "unimportantly beautiful" island home. Here, the wanderer fears that he has been tainted by his exile, that his life has become untranslatable, and that his craft itself is rooted in betrayal of the vivid archipelago to which, like Antaeus, he must return for the very sustenance of life.

The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says, drawn from pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere.This collection forms a volume of remarkable elegance, concision, and brilliance. It includes Walcott's moving and insightful examinations of the paradoxes of Caribbean culture, his Nobel lecture, and his reckoning of the work and significance of such poets as Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Frost, Les Murray, and Ted Hughes, and of prose writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Patrick Chamoiseau.On every subject he takes up, Walcott the essayist brings to bear the lyric power and syncretic intelligence that made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.

The Bounty was the first book of poems Derek Walcott published after winning the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.Opening with the title poem, a memorable elegy to the poet's mother, the book features a haunting series of poems that evoke Walcott's native ground, the island of St. Lucia. "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves," Walcott's great contemporary Joseph Brodsky once observed. "He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."

Derek Walcott's eighth collection of poems, The Arkansas Testament, is divided into two parts--"Here," verse evoking the poet's native Caribbean, and "Elsewhere." It opens with six poems in quatrains whose memorable, compact lines further Walcott's continuous effort to crystallize images of the Caribbean landscape and people.For several years, Derek Walcott has lived mainly in the United States. "The Arkansas Testament," one of the book's long poems, is a powerful confrontation of changing allegiances. The poem's crisis is the taking on of an extra history, one that challenges unquestioning devotion.

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott's celebrated, inimitable, essential career "e;He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."e; Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like "e;In My Eighteenth Year,"e; published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like "e;A Far Cry from Africa,"e; which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like "e;The Schooner Flight"e; from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender "e;Sixty Years After,"e; from the 2010 collection White Egrets. Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

Three plays by the Nobel-laureate Derek Walcott, brought together for the first time in The Haitian TrilogyIn the history plays that comprise The Haitian Trilogy--Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours and The Haytian Earth--Derek Walcott, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion.In Henri Christophe and The Haytian Earth, Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionaries--led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe--whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption. Drums and Colours, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era.From Henri Christophe's high style to the bracing vernacular of The Haytian Earth, to the epic scale and scope of Drums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice.